Metroid X v1.3e Alpha Build Test

Gaming Indie Works
101

So… what? You’re giving up on me now?

… Setting aside the fact that its a Fan-Game and I’m a lone amateur developer, and the fact that I have not yet set any “specific time” to bug fixing … just merely taken a few out here and there as it pleases me. I want to have fun making the game itself, without that theres no point in doing it full stop. No one is paying me for it and in turn you dont have to pay for it either.

WIP is WIP… if you find a bug instead of passing it off as “buggy” try figuring out how the bug works and tell me about it so I can fix it.

102

:confused:
i dont exactly know how you coded…

you really need to set exact replica keys for global variables, such as when you press right and left at same time, it does right action key movements.

you need to rework you animations.

…the spinny thing is kinda cool though…

anyways, you also have tile glitches i dont understand (such as with dissapearing tiles), and i dont understand how the keys were set up with custom controls so that the original keys aren’t relative. personally, i would recomend finishing all the bugs and stuff on this one before adding more content, otherwise, bugs spawn more bugs.

103

Whats wrong with the animations? They dont need to be reworked … just completed.

Dissapearing tiles? I have not seen this at all, please be more specific. There is one tile in 1 room that I simply “missed” putting there.

Like I said before how about telling me how and where you found the bugs so I CAN fix them.

Keys are not finished … when I get around to finishing them then I will fix the bugs as with everything else. I will always first and foremost do features before bugs … thats how I do things… if you dont like that, dont play it, because you certainly dont know how to report a bug properly.

104

Meta-Ridley… too… hard… didn’t even land a single hit

105

well, there is the ducking thing of course, i dont even know what the hell you did for the both keys pressed, lol.

the tile dissapear rate will bite you later, though it is most likely with just those few tiles (maybe tile collisions?) near the speed booster.

really i believe the core problem is how you set up the multiple keys thing, and the control change.

i really havn’t played it a large amount, i just tested the basics in the first 3 rooms.

really, just do as i say, and the glitches will be solved with relative ease :smiley: :

make a list of all the basics (such as running, then jumping, ducking, etc.), then try pressing another key while doing these if they work perfectly, also, really screw with it, move back and forth fast, after changing to face right, duck as fast as possible, try and do something that just prompts a glitch.

try it by system, each and every combination possible, try, and mark if off the list, then move one to the next thing. it is hard work, but it can be done.

i really cant help you much unless i know how you coded it (not as in what functions or anything you used, just the logic and order)

also, when you fully get the thing mastered, do yourself a service…first, rework the code to make everything specific (more code, no bugs, lots of {}{}{} involved), then, save, make a new file, and then sytematically write down things that can be grouped together, congratz, now you have a perfectly suited engine.

also, if you want help with the bug thing, just send me the file through pm, not the entire thing, since i wouldn’t trust me either, but for instance, just the running, and jumping, i will see how you use logic, and thus be a better help, and be able to directly help, no credit or anything required of course.

-illogical thoughts of SD47

106

I fixed the customizable keys last night, as well as Samus Dancing.

I hadnt fixed them yet because they werent as important as making features. You make it sound like if I dont fix them now I’ll never be able to fix them, which is wrong.

Tile dissapear “rate”?? what are you talking about? Post a screenshot of this Tile dissapearing (F12) please.

And finally … No … I wont be changing my ways any time soon. Like I said before I’m an amateur developer and I’m only interested in having fun making this game, that means making features before fixing bugs. I’m not getting paid to do this … so I shall make it as I see fit.

107

That’s procrastination, which leads to this:

[size=40]| = fixing glitches

  • = adding new features[/size]

With procrastination:
----------||||||||||||||||||||||||project dies

Without procrastination:
-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|

…
Doing it for fun or not, you should still work on fixing glitches right as they come up or they will just come back to haunt you in great numbers later.

Samus dancing may not seem like a very important glitch to fix, but it would have been much simpler just to fix it when it first came up than when you have speed boost, screw attack, and all those other features. Or maybe not. It depends how you coded it. You may have been lucky with that one.

Still, I’ve been thinking a lot about this since last time, and glitches really do need to be solved right away.

Edit: Anyway, I haven’t played this in a while. goes to test out the newest version

108

meh, your choice, have fun!

also, how do you find your screenshots taken (this would help me in world of warcraft as well, lol)

109

Wow, this has gotten a whole lot farther along since the last time I played it :O_O:

Just a few things.

  • The level design is clever, but really, really annoying. It needs less mindless moving and bombing and moving and bombing, and jumping and moving and jumping and jumping and moving and jumping.
  • The title screen music shouldn’t have so many effects going on… What ever happened to normal music before GM got those crazy effects? At least make it normal past the introduction.
  • Shinesparking is REALLY fun <_<
  • Arg, you blocked off the SB I always take with speed-booster blocks…
  • Arg, you fixed the block maze SW
  • Arg, I had to travel all the way back through the huge room after wasting a missile until I finally found an enemy that gave me 1 back. And I didn’t know about the way to the block maze at the time.
  • Ridley can be shinesparked. And then he sits there taking damage for 10 seconds. Intentional?
  • Ridley’s tail does too much damage
  • Save stations now! ;_;
  • dead
  • doesn’t want to go through all of that AGAIN just to test out Ridley’s room some more
110

Heh … I always look forward to your feedback Troid since you at least know how to test a game.

Shine-Spark stun Meta-Ridley is an intentional feature which may need balancing or maybe scrapping. Meta-Ridley in general was intentionally left extremely hard in order to judge response to the difficulty level … he is “moderately hard” even for me who has to play the game over and over in testing. I usually have to collect around 30-50% items including at least 2 Energy Tanks if I want a chance at beating him. So far responses are as: 1 Really Enjoyed the Fight, 3 Said it was too hard, 1 “Gave Up, but insisted that he didnt lose”.

Level Design problems is a given. 2 Things though, I didnt get time to redesign all of the levels after changing the jump physics, which causes a little more problems than it used to be. So yea they need to be remoddled so theirs not so much “claustrophobic step jumping”, poor Samus is going to have to buff the scratches out of her helmet. The second thing is I dont have slope programming yet, reason being is conventional slope programming methods arent compatible with what I’ve done for the collision detection on block event. So the collision detection on blocks may need to be redone in order for me to fix that, I can then add some proper slopes in those ascending corridors instead of playing ping pong with the walls.

Save Stations, if easy enough to implement - which I suspect it is, will make it into the next version.

As you might have noticed although bugs dont take priority over features many have been fixed since the last time you played. I never said I wont fix bugs period … I’ve just waited until they were either in my way of creating a feature or just too damn annoying. Consider that I probably have to play-test the game like 100x more than you guys do and whatever bugs are frustrating you will eventually frustrate me too. What I dont like however is being pressured into spending time making my game “super perfect” just because a few people cant stand seeing bugs in a game that is WIP.

Let me try and give a bit of perspective from my point of view … as I play normally I try to visualise what is happening in the game code. Often a bug will happen and I either recognise “oh I get whats happening there” and I’ll fix it immediately or I dont recognise and shrug it off as “I will look at it later”. The worst kinds of bugs are the ones that are hard to nail down to a specific cause, those are the bugs that get “shrugged off” until I eventually set aside some time to look at them and fix them. Anyone who plays my game and tests it can help me turn these “shrugged off” bugs into “immediate fix” by finding the causes to them … people like You (Troid) help me do this to a large extent. People like smartdude47 who only like to complain about the bugs and not attempt to isolate when they are occuring dont help me at all, and as such the fixes for these bugs are “delayed” until I’m done with the features for said release or they just annoy me into fixing them.

Looking at this from a stress-level standpoint, the time I spend making the game is greatly involved in creating features for the game … this keeps me happy and motivated and lowers stress. Fixing bugs when they irritate me makes me feel like I’ve “accomplished” something on my own will which also leaves me satisfied.

Being pushed around into hammering away at a “stubborn bug” that people just “want to see fixed”, takes away time from creating the features and I am not directly motivated into fixing the specific bug people want to see fixed. This increases my stress and I tend to feel like the production of the game itself is getting slowed.

When someone can report the specific instance of a bug, how and where it occurs, I will think about it coding wise … take a look at the section of the code and judge: How hard will it be to fix this? Will it require me to completely rewrite a section of code? Or do I merely need to insert a line of code somewhere to solve the problem? If the answer is the latter then I will fix the bug there and then. If its not I will keep thinking about it until I think I have a solution that accomodates reworking a certain part of code and attempts to cater for future modifications, when I get an idea I’ll backup my work and give it a shot. If it produces anywhere near the desired result (even if it fixes the problem but screws up something else) I will then spend the rest of the time fixing that bug and making everything work with it. Once I spend more than even 10-20 minutes on any section of code be it feature or bug, I dont stop until it is done, Sleep/Food/Oxygen becomes a secondary objective.

Well thats basically my entire mental approach to programming spelled out. Everything covers with me “being motivated” being the top-priority. Like I’ve said very early on,the first thing I noticed about people making fan-games is that people actually give up. I dont have a huge team of people helping nor do I have any experience working in a team, but the one thing I’m bringing to the table is a development approach structured towards preventing me from giving up.

Edit: PS. The default GM Save State Buttons (F5/F6) have been left in. However if used at the wrong time it can cause Errors or wierd effects like slow music. To use them safely, save the game anywhere with F5 and make sure you are in the game playing before attempting to load. If you try to load directly from the title screen many variables will not get initialised and the current music and its reverb settings will get carried over. Use at your own risk… or wait until v1.4e for Save Stations.

111

Ah, okay. You just made it sound like you rarely fix any glitches at all and just leave them in until later. The way you just explained is a much better approach.

goes to test out the game some more

I’ll edit this post eventually.

Edit:
If you escape Ridley’s room, he never appears when you go back. <_<

Your level design is actually a whole lot better than I originally thought, now that I’ve found all that stuff that I didn’t find before. There are a few annoying dead ends, but I know you’ll fix the annoyance of them when you get rid of the giant vertical shafts with platforms on the sides.

Just a question, though, is there any need for the scan visor outside the first room? Visors in this game aren’t really necessary, as you can see through walls already, and if you can’t you can just bomb all the walls, so the scan visor will be the only visor you use if you use it… unless you come up with some really sweet and innovative ideas for visors. But I’m thinking that you could do more really sweet and innovative things if you get rid of visors and use the extra button for something else. Like an easier control system or beam switching. Maybe you could use stacked beams as normal, but be able to choose up to four different combinations on the pause menu that you can switch to in the game. That way when I get the ice beam I don’t always have to hit weak enemies twice but can still freeze whenever I feel like it.

I dunno, having another button just lets you do a whole lot more… And visors don’t work as well in a 2-D game where you can just bomb to find things. Super Metroid’s X-ray just made finding secrets a little easier. It wasn’t anything too special.

And I found a humorous little glitch worth mentioning… When you first start the game, don’t move in any direction, and crouch. You’ll disappear. Now stand up. You’ll be a giant block until you move <__<. That’s just because you start with no score, and on the debug mode screen all the directions appear as zero. Your program just doesn’t know what to display when you do that, so it displays a giant block… for some reason.

Edit: OMG SWEET. I managed to find a hidden song in your game. I had a save state in Ridley’s battle, and when I went there from the first room of the game in debug mode, Brinstar Green suddenly started playing. That was sweet.

112

Ya I actually had expected to have Boss Doors done before I released but I wanted to release ridley before I started Uni again (which has started so Development may slow :angry:). Its not hard to do I already have it thought out … but yea like SM/All Metroid Games you’re not supposed to be able to leave the room until you’ve beaten the boss.

The Scan Visor is intended to be used more towards revealing story and “hints” on objects in a room rather than a tool to be used in game. Like giving the player the option to play using it and getting juicy details about whats happening/happened in the story plot or adversely ignoring it and playing it just like SM where what you see is what you get. I still have to figure out the details and its still incomplete … but that was the general idea. Its an Engine Test and its a “Feature”, whether or not I use it in any of the games I make is a different story.

I do also plan for a somewhat different X-Ray visor than the original SM one, the one I’m thinking of will be like my Scan Visor except the recticle replaced by a ray-beam shadow (kind of like shining a torch on a wall) and anything it passes over will reveal what is behind it. It may be a little more crude than the original SM, for the life of me I cant think of a way to show a “portion” of a sprite not within a certain collision box. I’ll figure something out.

As for Beam Combo’s I think I could go either way with that… some people have suggested the idea of secondary/tertiary buttons to support different beams/weapons, so it seems to be a popular request. But I do insist on making it like SM “at first” at least, just so I can continue with actually making all the beam types. Perhaps I will wait until after the first game I make with the engine to try altering it to another method. Once you have a solid engine you can then start playing with things specifically for game-play balance/style.

Edits:

Ya the wierdness with crouching before doing anything is solely because that part has been “left empty” for the “create Samus” intro and jingle.

Sorry to burst the bubble on finding that song but its always been available by pressing F9 as well as several other SM tracks and a Metroid 1 “Kraid” track. :stuck_out_tongue:

113

Oh. I did press all the function buttons at once when I found debug mode… That would be why. goes back to test out those songs

Edit: Um… Is that my Kraid MIDI? Sounds just like it… same instruments, same tempo. <_< I don’t remember anybody asking permission to use it. Unless that’s the Nintendo remix I based it off :stuck_out_tongue:. Those weird effects on it make it hard to tell.

114

Not sure if it is or not, but I got it from www.metroidmetal.com from the associated Midi link. I just assumed that was the Nintendo Original. It has reverb on it like all the other songs do.

Edit: Just checked, yea the originals are totally different from each other.

115

O_O
I had never listened to that MIDI there… But that’s scarily similar.
…
Even when I open them in Anvil. Holy crap… I sure hope it’s just a coincidence that they used triplets instead of just going to 6/8 time, too… Wow, the only thing they changed is the instrument of the main theme and the way the lower part is written.

Meh, I don’t really care. I made that MIDI a really long time ago, and even then it was pretty easy to make. And I updated it just now so I don’t have any proof that I made it two to three years ago anyway (I just realized I had an older version on my GeoCities account). Plus it’s based on the official Nintendo remix I found somewhere, which sounds almost exactly the same as these two MIDIs.

Okay, so you’re fine. Carry on.

116

Update! version 1.3e has been released, see the first post for more information.

Download:

FileUpYours - Metroid X 1.3e

117

jumping feels a bit like im underwater

quite a few times i hovered jumping in air (spinjump) near a corner

start charging your beam while crouched, and before it is fully charged, turn into a ball…from there it gets fun…

when pressing right and not running because something is in your way, the charge beam is ahead of you.

the first door (outside it) can be sat upon while in bomb form, now, hold left, and set a bomb, you will go through the door, and when you exit from other side (you are now in first room), you will be inside door as a ball

while running and aiming diagonally (speed boost), you shoot straight

ridley ussually can be damaged with mouth closed…everywhere…unlike kraid…

some more i forgot (sry)

118

In response to SD’s post:

Jumping is fine. In fact, running and jumping seems way more fluid and comfortable than before.

Yeah, sometimes you get stuck floating while spin-jumping near a corner. Seems to be with both concave and convex corners.

Some of those morph-charge glitches happen if you switch weapons while charging.

My own comments:

Ridley is still too hard. It’s just a combination of the platforms getting in the way, the damage he and his tail do to you, the fact that you can only hit him by hanging out by him which damages you badly by his tail, etc. It just needs a little fixing. Maybe get rid of the platforms completely, keep his mouth open until a certain amount of damage is done, lower the amount of damage he does, and maybe make the shinespark charge do some damage since stunning him usually gets you damaged by his tail and doesn’t help much anyway.

The old rooms still have some tedious, frustrating, and mazey level design, but the new rooms are fine.

If you set a key to “shift”, it goes to its default setting for some reason. A little annoying with my usual control setup.

119

it doesn’t seem more fluid…course i have been playing zm for a while, i guess you are comparing to sm…sorry…been a while since i played that one.

i didn’t notice it with concave, you probably are right though.

also, why does metal-ridley have to be damaged by open mouth? he is ussually damaged by any area, isn’t he?

also, the one block standings (standing on a single small block) is very annoying, and often leads to an upward jump (thus you fall to the ground).

i have a couple more things, but i have to leave to help someone move, be back soon.

120

It’s Meta Ridley, not “Metal-Ridley”, and you can hit him anywhere. He’s only vulnerable with his mouth open, but that doesn’t mean you have to aim for his mouth.